In a recording apparatus (liquid ejecting apparatus) provided with an automatic feeder, a plurality of recording media (target media) are stacked on a media feeding tray and a top one of the recording media is picked up by a hopper and a separator and fed to the inside of the recording apparatus. The present invention relates to a returner for returning at least one recording medium accompanied with the top one to the medium feeding tray.
The term “liquid ejecting apparatus” as used herein includes not only recording apparatus such as a printer, a copier, and a facsimile machine that use an ink jet recording head and perform recording on a recording material by ejecting ink from the recording head but also an apparatus that ejects liquid suitable for a purpose instead of ink from a liquid ejecting head toward a target material and thereby cause the liquid to land on the target material.
Examples of the liquid ejecting head other than the recording head are a colorant ejecting head used for manufacture of color filters of a liquid crystal display or the like, an electrode material (conductive paste) ejecting head used for formation of electrodes of an organic EL display, a field emission display (FED), or the like, a bioorganic material ejecting head used for manufacture of a biochip, and a sample ejecting head as precision pipettes.
An ink jet printer as an example of the ink jet recording apparatus or the liquid ejecting apparatus will be hereinafter described.
In the ink jet printer, in the event of what is called a multiple feed in which plural sheets are picked up in such a manner as to lie one on another, the single top sheet is separated from the lower sheets by a separating action of a separator such as a separation pad, a retarding roller, or the like. The ends of separated lower sheets are hooked on a hook member of a returning lever and the lower sheets are thereby returned to a feeding tray.
Japanese Patent Publication No. 11-71036A discloses a structure that two separation pads. A main separation pad first acts on sheets to perform a first separating operation and then an auxiliary separation pad acts on the sheets to perform a second separating operation, thereby separating the sheets reliably. Capable of rotating in both of the normal and reverse directions, the auxiliary separation pad disclosed in this publication also has a function of returning lower sheets to the feeding tray by rotating in the reverse direction when a hopper separates the sheets from a feeding roller. As such, it can be said that the auxiliary separation pad has also the sheet returning function.
However, in a case where many stacked sheets having a large size such as A3 sheets are subjected to the returning operation, the returning lever or the auxiliary separation pad cannot return those sheets by itself to the prescribed positions on the feeding tray because the returning force is not strong enough to sustain the weight of those sheets. More specifically, as shown in FIG. 8, among sheets P that are pressed against the feeding roller 102 as the hopper 101 is elevated, the single top sheet P0 is fed into a transporting path while several top sheets P1 are remained in such a condition as to be somewhat pulled from sheets P2 located under themselves toward the transporting path.
Because of the frictional force caused by their own weight, the lower sheets P2 also remain in close contact with the sheets P1 without sliding down on a support frame 103 below. Even if the returning lever 104 or the auxiliary pad disclosed in this publication is caused to operate in this state, only the upper sheets P1 are subjected to the sheet returning action. Since the lower sheets P2 stand by behind in such a manner as to be in close contact with the upper sheets P1 and hence there is no return space, the attempt of returning the sheets P1 is not completed.
One conventional measure against the above problem is to decrease the attachment angle of a paper support attached to the feeding tray so that not all of the weight of sheets P is exerted on the support frame 103 and the returning lever 104 or the like. However, decreasing the attachment angle of the paper support leads to size increase of the ink jet printer and is a factor of disordering the arrangement of the sheets P. Further, it is not certain whether sheets P can be returned onto the feeding tray reliably even by decreasing the attachment angle of the paper support.